


Chance

by estherlyon



Series: Prompts in a Galaxy far far away [5]
Category: Rogue One: A Star Wars Story (2016)
Genre: Established Relationship, F/M, Idiots dealing with their feelings, Mentions of Smut, Rebelcaptain Secret Valentine Exchange, Some angst
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-02-15
Updated: 2018-02-15
Packaged: 2019-03-19 01:48:10
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,950
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/13694331
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/estherlyon/pseuds/estherlyon
Summary: Jyn didn't know what it was.





	Chance

**Author's Note:**

  * For [anothersadsong](https://archiveofourown.org/users/anothersadsong/gifts).



> Happy Valentine's Day, [oh-nostalgiaa](http://oh-nostalgiaa.tumblr.com)! 
> 
> The prompt was these dorks saying "I love you" for the first time and I just ran with it.

Jyn hated that she didn’t know what it was, ever since Scarif. When they had sat down on the beach and Cassian had opened his mouth to speak, she had automatically given him a warning look, because she felt he would say something she wouldn’t be able to deal with. Inexplicably, it was relief that coursed through her body when he mentioned her father instead. It was an oblique way to say things _he_ felt about her, but that just turned it into something bearable, less… Well, scary.

It said a lot that she was more scared of what might come out of Cassian’s mouth than of the ground trembling below her in what she knew was another strike by the Death Star and, therefore, certain death.

But Bodhi got them out, and she had sat down in the belly of another stolen ship with Cassian’s head on her lap, watching as he breathed with his mouth open and his teeth tinted with blood. Her insides had screamed all throughout that ride and when they wrenched him away from her back on base, she had made such inhuman sounds the medical personnel, organic or otherwise, were forced to sedate her and confine her to a medbay bed. Her physical injuries were not as dramatic – torn muscle and ligament, burned skin – but for the first day and a half after they were brought in, she would wake up screaming and shaking and anyone that tried to talk to her would fail to get a coherent response. It was like the words were caught in her chest and wouldn’t get out.

In time, however, she healed, trying with all her might to focus on that instead of the fact that Alliance command had no idea where the Death Star plans were. She had lunch and dinner with Bodhi, she meditated with Chirrut, she went target practicing and talked weapons with Baze. And when she was not doing any of those things, she watched Cassian float in bacta, all the while getting used to the scratch of the rough Alliance issue jacket against the insides of her wrists and the back of her neck, and discovering how she could use the pockets in her new fatigues.

She still didn’t know what it was, when Cassian woke up. A farmer from Tatooine had brought Princess Leia and the plans back. Then the same boy – so out of place, with his confidence and large eyes –, blew her father’s machine into smithereens. Instead of partying like most of the personnel on base, she chose to sit next to Cassian in the dingy med ward. The whole of the Alliance was in such a raucous state that his eyes fluttered open and even if his mouth looked dry and sticky and he visibly couldn’t even begin to know where he was, she had to contain herself not to kiss him. Which was something entirely novel. She had never felt the urge to kiss someone simply for the hell of it; usually she kissed people so it initiated sex, the kind that was had only because people had needs. As she learned, however, with Cassian everything was off-kilter for her: she wanted to hold his hand; she found herself wiping his forehead when his breathing exercises made him sweat; she rubbed his back when it ached. It was touching born out of care and necessity, but also out of something she couldn’t – or was just too afraid of – to name.

When she first gave into that impulse, on base on Thila, she still couldn’t delve into it without trepidation. She kissed him and something broke for them not unlike a dam of some sort, and that first night when she had her hand ready to tap on his quarters’ door, he had already opened it, as if he were going out. She opened her mouth to ask him where he was going and he muttered something she couldn’t understand and then said,

“Well, that saves time,” and had proceeded to pull her inside by the hand and then press her against the door, his mouth hot and eager on hers, as she felt something akin to molten led sink down her belly and her groin.

It was entirely foreign, the way they whispered as they moved over each other, with short questions ( _“like this?”_ ) and grunted (on her part) and breathy (on his) replies (“ _yes, right there, don’t stop_ ”). But not only that, it was also the way he slipped inside her so easily, the way she found herself grabbing on to him like she wanted him to melt entirely inside her skin, rubbing herself against him all in the right places; and then how she went over the edge with her eyes watering and a hollow scream in her throat, to which he had his mouth open against in pleasure as well. She was left feeling mellow and boneless, but also stupefied, especially because for the first time in her life, she didn’t feel like bolting out of the room. She wanted nothing else but to bury herself against the hardness and the softness of Cassian’s body and just simply exist for as many hours as that respite on base afforded them.

Thereafter, when they spoke about what was going on between them, it was in terms of wants and wishes and needs.

“I need you inside me,” she said a few weeks later, voice muffled by the engine’s noise, as he bent her over a crate in a ship’s cargo hold in what was the best hyperspace sex she had ever had.

“I want you, Jyn” he said, eyes glistening in the aftermath of an argument where she had panicked about the whole thing and shut him out for two standard days, “all I could think in that elevator was that I wanted you and I wouldn’t get to have you.”

“I wish you didn’t have to go,” she allowed herself to say on Thila one morning, when he was shipping out to meet Draven at an unspecified location.

And then there was Hoth, where they had no choice but to huddle against each other at every given opportunity. When they first arrived on Echo Base, the quartermaster gave them access to same quarters as if the fact that Jyn was a sergeant and therefore meant to sleep in a shared dorm wasn’t an issue whatsoever. And from the moment that they both let their duffels fall to the floor in that corner of those ice caves, something else just clicked into place, like the engines her father would show her when she was little. She learned to deal with the fact that Cassian was a morning person no matter how kriffing cold it was and so would get up letting out a string of curses in his native Festian and the cold get in between their covers. On his part, she saw that he learned to understand her own circadian rhythm and to stop haranguing her whenever she came back all sweaty from a training session in fewer clothes than she should be wearing.

(“You like it when I’m naked.”

“Yes, but I would like it more if you didn’t catch pneumonia.”)

They still shipped out on missions and she learned to deal with how her heart wrenched and her stomach ached when he was away with K-2SO and with the novel feeling of being waited for whenever she walked off a ship’s ramp and into his arms. And she was perfectly aware, at least on an intellectual level, that this was _war_ and that though it came natural to them – this expectation that things would one day go haywire – life wasn’t supposed to be like this.  

Until.

There was an alarm one morning and Cassian was leaping off the bed before it had even properly started ringing. There had been talk of Imperial probes on other planets and they sent Skywalker and a bunch of others to check the perimeter. Everyone came back, except the farmer turned Jedi. Solo, who at that point had one foot out the proverbial door to go pay Jabba the Hutt, decided to go out, too. He also didn’t come back.

Jyn had been helping Bodhi with repairs on his X-Wing and watched as the princess paced the hangar, eyes on the doors for the men who were now the most important in her life, even if she wouldn’t admit it. Jyn had had scares with Cassian before, but this somehow felt different. The fact that it was on Hoth, that at one point they would have to close the base doors and leave them outside to freeze, it just made the situation seem crueler, almost stupid even. It was one thing for people to disappear during missions – either captured by Imperials or by their collaborators. Even if Hoth was a deadly planet – prone to blizzards and all sorts of weird snow creatures – by now the Rebels stationed there had learned to deal with that reality. Watching Leia wringing her hands and barely keep her usual stoic expression in place made Jyn suddenly remember that in war – as in life – sometimes mere chance got in the way.

“What do you think happened?” she asked Cassian earnestly, when she grabbed him away from the Command Center with a cup of caff and a heat pack for his back.

“We honestly don’t know,” he replied, “the probes are just that – probes. If the Imps were here already, they wouldn’t just kill two of our people and then lay low for this much time.”

“Some freak accident then,” she said, “like Baze with the Wampa that time.”

“Or that time Wedge fell into a hole.”

“Kriff.”

She buried her face in his shoulder that night, but sleep didn’t come easily and by the time he was up, to help monitor the search op, she was wide awake also, and went to see if she could be of any assistance.

And then another piece of the puzzle that she felt were she and Cassian finally fell into place, when she saw Leia clomp away in her snow boots towards the ship that brought back her friends. Luke’s face was a mess of white, purple and blue, and the princess hovered over it with trembling hands, only to let medical take him away and then crash into Solo’s arms with her legs giving away beneath her. It was something Jyn would never see again, even as the smuggler and the young pilot got in harms’ way repeatedly over the length of the war.

It was how fragile it all was. That, yes, war could take Cassian and Bodhi and Chirrut and Baze and even Kay away, but also the little things that came with it could do the same thing. A simple perimeter check, a haphazard search for a lost friend.

They were in the mess hall, a last meal before they began prepping for evacuation, when she stopped wolfing down her food to look at Cassian – the way his hair was falling over his tired eyes and how he adhered to table manners even through chaos.

“I love you.”

He looked up at her with wide eyes, that face he did that made him actually seem like was twenty-eight.

“I-“

“Just so you know. In case, well, a beam falls over your head or something.”

He blinked.

She groaned. He put down his utelsils, picked up her hand.

“I love you, too, Jyn,” he said softly, “in case, you know, you choke on your food or something.”

She smiled at him and proceeded to eat a little slower, feeling decidedly warmer all over.


End file.
